HOWTO: Be more productive

“With all the time you spend watching TV,” he tells me, “you could have written a novel by now.” It’s hard to disagree with the sentiment — writing a novel is undoubtedly a better use of time than watching TV — but what about the hidden assumption? Such comments imply that time is “fungible” — that time spent watching TV can just as easily be spent writing a novel. And sadly, that’s just not the case.

Time has various levels of quality. If I’m walking to the subway station and I’ve forgotten my notebook, then it’s pretty hard for me to write more than a couple paragraphs. And it’s tough to focus when you keep getting interrupted. There’s also a mental component: sometimes I feel happy and motivated and ready to work on something, but other times I feel so sad and tired I can only watch TV.

If you want to be more productive then, you have to recognize this fact and deal with it. First, you have to make the best of each kind of time. And second, you have to try to make your time higher-quality.

Spend time efficiently

Choose good problems

Life is short (or so I’m told) so why waste it doing something dumb? It’s easy to start working on something because it’s convenient, but you should always be questioning yourself about it. Is there something more important you can work on? Why don’t you do that instead? Such questions are hard to face up to (eventually, if you follow this rule, you’ll have to ask yourself why you’re not working on the most important problem in the world) but each little step makes you more productive.

This isn’t to say that all your time should be spent on the most important problem in the world. Mine certainly isn’t (after all, I’m writing this essay). But it’s definitely the standard against which I measure my life.

Have a bunch of them

Another common myth is that you’ll get more done if you pick one problem and focus on it exclusively. I find this is hardly ever true. Just this moment for example, I’m trying to fix my posture, exercise some muscles, drink some fluids, clean off my desk, IM with my brother, and write this essay. Over the course the day, I’ve worked on this essay, read a book, had some food, answered some email, chatted with friends, done some shopping, worked on a couple other essays, backed up my hard drive, and organized my book list. In the past week I’ve worked on several different software projects, read several different books, studied a couple different programming languages, moved some of my stuff, and so on.

Having a lot of different projects gives you work for different qualities of time. Plus, you’ll have other things to work on if you get stuck or bored (and that can give your mind time to unstick yourself).

It also makes you more creative. Creativity comes from applying things you learn in other fields to the field you work in. If you have a bunch of different projects going in different fields, then you have many more ideas you can apply.

Make a list

Coming up with a bunch of different things to work on shouldn’t be hard — most people have tons of stuff they want to get done. But if you try to keep it all in your head it quickly gets overwhelming. The psychic pressure of having to remember all of it can make you crazy. The solution is again simple: write it down.

Once you have a list of all the things you want to do, you can organize it by kind. For example, my list is programming, writing, thinking, errands, reading, listening, and watching (in that order).

Most major projects involve a bunch of these different tasks. Writing this, for example, involves reading about other procrastination systems, thinking up new sections of the article, cleaning up sentences, emailing people with questions, and so on, all in addition to the actual work of writing the text. Each task can go under the appropriate section, so that you can do it when you have the right kind of time.

Integrate the list with your life

Once you have this list, the problem becomes remembering to look at it. And the best way to remember to look at it is to make looking at it what you would do anyway. For example, I keep a stack of books on my desk, with the ones I’m currently reading on top. When I need a book to read, I just grab the top one off the stack.

I do the same thing with TV/movies. Whenever I hear about a movie I should watch, I put it in a special folder on my computer. Now whenever I feel like watching TV, I just open up that folder.

I’ve also thought about some more intrusive ways of doing this. For example, a web page that pops up with a list of articles in my “to read” folder whenever I try to check some weblogs. Or maybe even a window that pops up with work suggestions occasionally for me to see when I’m goofing off.

Make your time higher quality

Making the best use of the time you have can only get you so far. The much more important problem is making more higher quality time for yourself. Most people’s time is eaten up by things like school and work. Obviously if you attend one of these, you should stop. But what else can you do?

Ease physical constraints

Carry pen and paper

Pretty much everyone interesting I know has some sort of pocket notebook they carry at all times. Pen and paper is immediately useful in all kinds of circumstances — if you need to write something down for somebody, take notes on something, scratch down an idea, and so on. I’ve even written whole articles in the subway.1

(I used to do this, but now I just carry my computerphone everywhere. It doesn’t let me give people information physically, but it makes up for it by giving me something to read all the time (email) and pushing my notes straight into my email inbox, where I’m forced to deal with them right away.)

Avoid being interrupted

For tasks that require serious focus, you should avoid getting interrupted. One simple way is to go somewhere interrupters can’t find you. Another is to set up an agreement with the people around you: “don’t bother me when the door is closed” or “IM me if I have headphones on” (and then you can ignore the IMs until you’re free).

You don’t want to overdo it. Sometimes if you’re really wasting time you should be distracted. It’s a much better use of time to help someone else with their problem than it is to sit and read the news. That’s why setting up specific agreements is a good idea: you can be interrupted when you’re not really focusing.

Ease mental constraints

Eat, sleep, exercise

Time when you’re hungry or tired or twitchy is low-quality time. Improving it is simple: eat, sleep, and exercise. Yet I somehow manage to screw up even this. I don’t like going to get food, so I’ll often work right through being hungry and end up so tired out that I can’t bring myself to go get food.2

It’s tempting to say to yourself, “I know I’m tired but I can’t take a nap — I have work to do”. In fact, you’ll be much more productive if you do take that nap, since you’ll improve the quality of the day’s remaining time and you were going to have to sleep sometime anyway.

I don’t really exercise much so I’m probably not the best person to give advice on that bit, but I do try to work it in where I can. While I’m lying down reading, I do situps. And when I need to go somewhere on foot, I run.

Talk to cheerful people

Easing mental constraints is much harder. One thing that helps is having friends who are cheerful. For example, I always find myself much more inclined to work after talking to Paul Graham or Dan Connolly — they just radiate energy. It’s tempting to think that you need to get away from people and shut yourself off in your room to do any real work, but this can be so demoralizing that it’s actually less efficient.

Share the load

Even if your friends aren’t cheerful, just working on a hard problem with someone else makes it much easier. For one thing, the mental weight gets spread across both people. For another, having someone else there forces you to work instead of getting distracted.

Procrastination and the mental force field

But all of this is sort of dodging the issue. The real productivity problem people have is procrastination. It’s something of a dirty little secret, but everyone procrastinates — severely. It’s not just you. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to stop it.

What is procrastination? To the outside observer, it looks like you’re just doing something “fun” (like playing a game or reading the news) instead of doing your actual work. (This usually causes the outside observer to think you’re lazy and bad.) But the real question is: what’s going on inside your head?

I’ve spent a bunch of time trying to explore this and the best way I can describe it is that your brain puts up a sort of mental force field around a task. Ever play with two magnets? If you orient the magnets properly and try to push them towards each other, they’ll repel fiercely. As you move them around, you can sort of feel out the edges of the magnetic field. And as you try to bring the magnets together, the field will push you back or off in another direction.

The mental block seems to work in the same way. It’s not particularly solid or visible, but you can sort of feel it around the edges. And the more you try to go towards it the more it pushes you away. And so, not surprisingly, you end up going in another direction.3

And just as you can’t get two repelling magnets to sit together just by pushing real hard — they’ll fling back as soon as you stop pushing — I’ve never been able to overcome this mental force field through sheer willpower. Instead, you have to be sneaky about it — you have to rotate a magnet.

So what causes the mental force field? There appear to be two major factors: whether the task is hard and whether it’s assigned.

Hard problems

Break it down

The first kind of hard problem is the problem that’s too big. Say you want to build a recipe organizing program. Nobody can really just sit down and build a recipe organizer. That’s a goal, not a task. A task is a specific concrete step you can take towards your goal. A good first task might be something like “draw a mockup of the screen that displays a recipe”. Now that’s something you can do.4

And when you do that, the next steps become clearer. You have to decide what a recipe consists of, what kind of search features are needed, how to structure the recipe database, and so on. You build up a momentum, each task leading to the next. And as your brain gets crunching on the subject, it becomes easier to solve that subject’s problems.

For each of my big projects, I think of all the tasks I can do next for them and add them to my categorized todo list (see above). And when I stop working on something, I add its next possible tasks to the todo list.

Simplify it

Another kind of hard problem is the one that’s too complicated or audacious. Writing a book seems daunting, so start by doing an essay. If an essay is too much, start by writing a paragraph summary. The important thing is to have something done right away.

Once you have something, you can judge it more accurately and understand the problem better. It’s also much easier to improve something that already exists than to work at a blank page. If your paragraph goes well, then maybe it can grow into an essay and then into a book, little by little, a perfectly reasonable piece of writing all the way through..

Think about it

Often the key to solving a hard problem will be getting some piece of inspiration. If you don’t know much about the field, you should obviously start by researching it — see how other people did things, get a sense of the terrain. Sit and try and understand the field fully. Do some smaller problems to see if you have a handle on it.

Assigned problems

Assigned problems are problems you’re told to work on. Numerous psychology experiments have found that when you try to “incentivize” people to do something, they’re less likely to do it and do a worse job. External incentives, like rewards and punishments, kills what psychologists call your “intrinsic motivation” — your natural interest in the problem. (This is one of the most thoroughly replicated findings of social psychology — over 70 studies have found that rewards undermine interest in the task.)5 People’s heads seem to have a deep avoidance of being told what to do.6

The weird thing is that this phenomenon isn’t just limited to other people — it even happens when you try to tell yourself what to do! If you say to yourself, “I should really work on X, that’s the most important thing to do right now” then all of the sudden X becomes the toughest thing in the world to make yourself work on. But as soon as Y becomes the most important thing, the exact same X becomes much easier.

Create a false assignment

This presents a rather obvious solution: if you want to work on X, tell yourself to do Y. Unfortunately, it’s sort of difficult to trick yourself intentionally, because you know you’re doing it.7 So you’ve got to be sneaky about it.

One way is to get someone else to assign something to you. The most famous instance of this is grad students who are required to write a dissertation, a monumentally difficult task that they need to do to graduate. And so, to avoid doing this, grad students end up doing all sorts of other hard stuff.

The task has to both seem important (you have to do this to graduate!) and big (hundreds of pages of your best work!) but not actually be so important that putting it off is going to be a disaster.

Don’t assign problems to yourself

It’s very tempting to say “alright, I need to put all this aside, hunker down and finish this essay”. Even worse is to try to bribe yourself into doing something, like saying “alright, if I just finish this essay then I’ll go and eat some candy”. But the absolute worst of all is to get someone else to try to force you to do something.

All of these are very tempting — I’ve done them all myself — but they’re completely counterproductive. In all three cases, you’ve basically assigned yourself a task. Now your brain is going to do everything it can to escape it.

Make things fun

Hard work isn’t supposed to be pleasant, we’re told. But in fact it’s probably the most enjoyable thing I do. Not only does a tough problem completely absorb you while you’re trying to solve it, but afterwards you feel wonderful having accomplished something so serious.

So the secret to getting yourself to do something is not to convince yourself you have to do it, but to convince yourself that it’s fun. And if it isn’t, then you need to make it fun.

I first got serious about this when I had to write essays for college. Writing essays isn’t a particularly hard task, but it sure is assigned. Who would voluntarily write a couple pages connecting the observations of two random books? So I started making the essays into my own little jokes. For one, I decided to write each paragraph in its own little style, trying my best to imitate various forms of speech. (This had the added benefit of padding things out.)8

Another way to make things more fun is to solve the meta-problem. Instead of building a web application, try building a web application framework with this as the example app. Not only will the task be more enjoyable, but the result will probably be more useful.

Conclusion

There are a lot of myths about productivity — that time is fungible, that focusing is good, that bribing yourself is effective, that hard work is unpleasant, that procrastinating is unnatural — but they all have a common theme: a conception of real work as something that goes against your natural inclinations.

And for most people, in most jobs, this may be the case. There’s no reason you should be inclined to write boring essays or file pointless memos. And if society is going to force you to do so anyway, then you need to learn to shut out the voices in your head telling you to stop.

But if you’re trying to do something worthwhile and creative, then shutting down your brain is entirely the wrong way to go. The real secret to productivity is the reverse: to listen to your body. To eat when you’re hungry, to sleep when you’re tired, to take a break when you’re bored, to work on projects that seem fun and interesting.

It seems all too simple. It doesn’t involve any fancy acronyms or self-determination or personal testimonials from successful businessmen. It almost seems like common sense. But society’s conception of work has pushed us in the opposite direction. If we want to be more productive, all we need to do is turn around.

I hope to address how to quit school in a future essay, but you should really just go out and pick up The Teenage Liberation Handbook. If you’re a computer person, one way to quit your job is by applying for funding from Y Combinator. Meanwhile, Mickey Z’s book The Murdering of My Years features artists and activists describing how they manage to make ends meet while still doing what they want.

Notes

Believe it or not, I actually have written in subways. It’s easy to come up with excuses as to why you’re not actually working — you don’t have enough time before your next appointment, people are making noise downstairs, etc. — but I find that when the inspiration strikes me, I can actually write stuff down on a subway car, where it’s absurdly loud and I only have a couple minutes before I have to get out and start walking. ↩

The same problem exists for sleep. There’s nothing worse than being too tired to go to bed — you just feel like a zombie. ↩

Now it turns out I experience this same phenomenon in another area: shyness. I often don’t want to call a stranger up on the phone or go talk to someone at a party and I have the exact same mental field pushing me off in some other direction. I suspect this might be because shyness is also a trait that results from a problematic childhood. (See “Assigned problems”.) Of course, this is all very speculative. ↩

While the terminology I use here (“next concrete step”) is derived from David Allen’s Getting Things Done, a lot of the principles here are (perhaps even unconsciously) applied in Extreme Programming (XP). Extreme Programming is presented as this system for keeping programs organized, but I find that a lot of it is actually good advice for avoid procrastination.

For example, pair programming automatically spreads the mental weight of the task across two people as well as giving people something useful to do during lower-quality time. Breaking a project down into concrete steps is another key part of XP, as is getting something that works done right away and improving on it (“Simplify it” infra). And these are just the things that aren’t programming-specific. ↩

I originally simply assumed this was somehow biological, but Paul Graham pointed out it’s more likely learned. When you’re little, your parents try their best to manipulate you. They say do your homework and your mind tries to wriggle free and think about something else. Soon enough the wriggling becomes habit. Either way, it’s going to be a tough problem to fix. I’ve given up trying to change this; now I try to work around it. ↩

Richard Feynman tells a story about how he was trying to explore his own dreams, much the way I’ve tried to explore my own procrastination. Each night, he’d try to observe what happened to himself as he fell asleep:

I’m dreaming one night as usual, making observations, … and then I realize I’ve been sleeping with the back of my head against a brass rod. I put my hand behind my head and I feel that the back of my head is soft. I think, “Aha! That’s why I’ve been able to make all these observations in my dreams: the brass rod has disturbed my visual cortex. All I have to do is sleep with a brass rod under my head and I can make these observations any time I want. So I think I’ll stop making observations on this one and go into deeper sleep.”

When I woke up later, there was no brass rod, nor was the back of my head soft. Somehow … my brain had invented false reasons as to why I shouldn’t [observe my dreams] any more. (Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, 50)

So, for example, instead of writing “By contrast, Riis doesn’t quote many people.”, I wrote: “Riis, however, whether because of a personal deficit in the skill-based capacity required for collecting aurally-transmitted person-centered contemporaneous ethnographies into published paper-based informative accounts or simply a lack of preference for the reportage of community-located informational correspondents, demonstrates a total failure in producing a comparable result.”

The professor, apparently seriously desensitized to bad writing, never seemed to realize I was joking (despite going over the paper with me one-on-one!). ↩

Comments

Thanks for this nice article. I find it helpful; however, I do not agree with this statement:

Even worse is to try to bribe yourself into doing something

Personnally, I found bribing myself effective. I would find something purely entertaining that I really wanted to do but never managed to do, because I tend to procrastine about leisure as much as about work.

Then I’d promise myself to do it in exchange for a very small task in a short time frame. This always ended up in 1) my completing the task then working some more, 2) my enjoyment of the entertaining thing, but with the desire to go back to work always on the back of my head.

Of course that’s just me, and I’ve read no studies about that, but I don’t think you should dismiss the idea so easily.

It’s amazing the things people will do to themselves in order to avoid sleeping when they are tired. People would rather sit half awake in their cubes through half of the afternoon than take a 20 minute nap. At my old job I caught a lot of flack for sneaking out to my car at lunch for a brief snooze even though it made me much more productive.

For me, one of the biggest contributors to the repellant force field around a task is that there is a component I don’t know how to do. This is made worse by the fact that I have not identified this obstacle; it has only created a wall of anxiety surrounding the task.

The key here is to identify that component (bring it into awareness), and decide the best way to proceed with it. Sometimes all I need is a piece of information, and all I need to do is think about where I might find it.

Example:

Task = File village income tax form.

Obstacle = I don’t have this form and don’t know where to get it.

Possible solutions: Call the village office; search the village website; ask someone who has lived in the village longer than I have; ask my accountant.

This is a simplistic example, but I find that even in complex projects, once the obstacle has been identified and made explicit, it’s usually pretty easy to brainstorm a solution.

I may be atypical, but for me the first three pieces of advice (“Choose good problems”, “Have a bunch of them”, and “Make a list”), which i’ve heard frequently given, and which i already try to do, are the source of much suffering and probably a dramatic loss of productivity.

“Why waste life doing something dumb?” I ask myself this question all the time, and it destroys my motivation to do whatever i am doing because no matter what i do, it is easy to think of a dozen other things that are more important (for some definition of “important”). In order to produce anything, i must constantly fight the urge to abandon what i am doing to start something “more important”.

“Have a bunch of them.” Yup, i have way too many problems in my head. I probably see three or four problems every day that i desperately want to solve. Shutting them out is the real challenge.

“Make a list.” Yup, i have hundreds of things to do on my list. When i look at the list, it can be agonizing i recall all the projects i have abandoned, or projects i really should be doing but aren’t, and think about how much stuff i won’t have time to get done before i die.

I’m not saying the advice is bad; it’s just that i have trouble, personally, when i start thinking along these lines.

Good article, thanks for writing it :) I agree with the majority of what you’ve written, particularly regarding the quality of time.

On the subject of rewards however I do find that bribing myself with rewards is often the only way I can get through really dull work. True, a lot of work is great in and of itself because it is a challenge to be solved, but there are things in every line of work which are just tedious and there’s no possible way (that I’ve found anyway) to make them fun.

For those kind of tasks I find that using a task sheet and giving myself a set amount of time to work on the task without being interrupted works well, with the added carrot on a stick at the end, eg - I have to work on these mind-numbing code corrections for one hour, and then I can go get a coffee and finish reading an article or answer some personal emails. I find this also provides much needed brain down-time, which also lets me work harder on the boring task.

I use the charts from http://www.to-done.com/2005/10/butterfly-stroke-productivity/ for my boring stuff, and I’ve also found them useful for creative work at home too if I’m feeling a bit unmotivated, eg - if I want to write music but I’m scared I won’t be able to get into it, I set myself a 3 hour task sheet (no reward necessary for the creative stuff) and I stick with it until the 3 hours are up because by then I’ve nearly always gotten into the flow of the creative work and improved my time from being ‘normal’ time to ‘creative’ time.

Most of the time breaking up hard tasks makes them easier to accomplish, but sometimes “stepwise refinement” leads to misleading conclusions. And then there is the whole complexity theory business…
One problem with wasting time writing useless memos is that at the time we often don’t realize they’re useless.
Productivity improvements are all well and good, but it’s easy to entangle getting more done in less time with getting better things done. Your time fungibility rebuttal is relevant here. See Covey’s book “First things first” where he makes these distinctions and helps us define those better things.

My struggle with procrastination is very similar to what is described here. I think a lot of it boils down to a feeling of inadequacy (as someone mentioned in the comments above). Allowing yourself the freedom to fail is very liberating.

Aaron, excellent article, although my first thought was: Why do I read it anyway? I mean, I’m familiar with all the issues you point out in your article. It all seems so obvious: make a list of all the tasks you are supposed to do, avoid being interrupted, take a break when you are tired, etc., etc. But then I realized that I actually don’t apply all these useful rules in my everyday life! Why don’t I start working by writing down a list of assignments? Why do I study for my exams for 12 hours day after day, even though I’m dead tired? Why do I always put aside all the problems which seem too difficult to deal with, instead of coping with them at once? I came to the conclusion that people generally tend to forget about the simplest principles and simplest solutions. Thanks for reminding me that!

Your article is awesome; I’m really moved and inspired by everything written in the article. I can see my productivity at different lever if I really can follow everything in this article. One thing that I really liked in your article is interruptions. I saw how many interruptions I tolerate, in fact every 5 minutes I’ve recreated a structure that I get interrupted either from phone call or from IM or from email or from people around me. I can�t believe that I’ve been wasting so much of my time tolerating my in effectiveness. You article has given me lot of insights thanks for submitting it.

I like your advice here a great deal, but I must disagree with one of your initial assumptions, that being that watching television is a waste of time. Of course, you go back and argue that the time you spend watching tv isn’t necessarily wasted, so I’m not exactly taking you to task, but I did want to offer a slightly different perspective. Two thousand years ago, Plato was writing during the period in which writing was being invented. Consider what it would mean to live when writing was first coming into use and how you might view it as a technological advance. Plato had mixed feelings about it, but he often derided it as the refuge of the lazy. In his mind, writing allowed people to keep records, which ultimately meant that they didn’t have to remember. Arguments didn’t have to be worked out internally but could be set down and worked out on paper. The point I’m getting at is that all technology has met with skepticism. And those of the past will deride it by saying it will make us “lazy.” Without question these new technologies WILL change the way we behave. But 2000 years from now, people may be hanging on to old Seinfeld episodes as classical literature and arguing that the newest gadget is rotting kids’ minds.

I love the idea of “solving the meta problem.” It makes it possible to contextualize what seems like busy work as part of a greater project (or even life work). I’m not sure how I stumbled on this essay, but it’s still totally relevant and useful in 2011. Thanks!

P.S. Have you seen this animated Philip Zomardo lecture, “The Secret Powers of Time”? He touches on rewards a bit. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3oIiH7BLmg

You make the assertion “… that time spent watching TV can just as easily be spent writing a novel. And sadly, that’s just not the case.”

Actually, you should have listened to the person who told you that, because it’s true. You can easily spend that time writing a novel, and nanowrimo.org helps thousands of people realize that fact every year.